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Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning African American poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 8 1928 and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 28, 2014. Angelou was also a dancer, an actress and a singer.
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Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., is an American former boxer and three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who is widely considered one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. After turning professional, he went on to become the first boxer to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times.
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Billy Collins is an American poet who served two terms as the 44th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001–2003. He's arguably the greatest poet of the 21st century.
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Alice Walker is an American poet, activist, author and feminist. She is one of the most celebrated in modern history. Her most famous work, The Color Purple, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and it remains one of the bestselling books in the United States.
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Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago, Illinois on December 21, 1954, is a United States author and poet best known for her novel The House on Mango Street. She is also the author of Caramelo, published by Knopf in 2002. Much of her writing is influenced by her Mexican-American heritage. She the only daughter in a Mexican-American family of seven children.
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Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright born in Glasgow, Scotland. Duffy is the first female and first Scottish Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
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An American novelist, essayist, poet, professor, cultural critic and farmer.. American man of letters academic cultural and economic critic and farmer
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Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC, O.Ont, FRSC is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.. poet novelist essayist
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Jack Prelutsky is an American creator of inventive poems for children and adults alike. He served as the Poetry Foundation’s Children’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008.
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Gary Soto was born April 12, 1952 in Fresno, California. He is known as a poet, novelist, and Children's Literature author whose notable works include: “Petty Crimes”, “New and Selected Poems”, and “Living Up the Street”. Soto has won numerous awards including the Academy of American Poets Prize, American Book Award, NEA Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
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An Irish poet.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies.
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Stephen Dunn is an American poet. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.. American poet
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Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1993, the second African American to be appointed, and received a second special appointment in 1999. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.. American poet and author; US Poet Laureate
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Vikram Seth (Hindi) is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist. Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.
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William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands' rainforests .
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Gilbert "Gil" Scott-Heron was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author known primarily for his work as a spoken word performer in the 1970s and '80s, and for his collaborative works with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist", which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues". The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul.
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Sonia Sanchez is an African American poet most often associated with the Black Arts Movement. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books. She was a 1993 Pew Fellowships in the Arts.. African American poet; associated with the Black Arts Movement
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Judith Viorst (born February 3, 1931) is an American author, newspaper journalist, and psychoanalysis researcher. She is perhaps best known [ citation needed ] for her children's literature, such as The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (about the death of a pet) and the Alexander series of short picture books, which includes Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972), which has sold over two million copies.
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Rod McKuen is a bestselling American poet, composer, and singer. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s.
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Donald Andrew Hall, Jr., known as Donald Hall, is an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford, Hall is the author of over 50 books across several genres. On June 14, 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Born in 1928, he had a long and prolific career, earning numerous awards and honors for his poetry and prose. His work often explored themes of rural life, nature, and the passing of time. Hall's writing was known for its precise language and vivid images, and he became one of the most respected and influential poets of his generation. Hall was dedicated to promoting poetry and encouraging young writers throughout his life. His extensive body of work continues to resonate with readers, capturing the beauty and complexity of the human experience.
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An American poet.. American poet; 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
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James Emanuel (born June 15, 1921 – September 28, 2013) was a poet and scholar from Alliance, Nebraska. Emanuel, who is ranked by some critics as one of the best and most neglected poets of the 20th century, published more than 300 poems, 13 individual books, an influential anthology of African American literature, an autobiography, and more. He is also credited with creating a new literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, often read with musical accompaniment.
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Craig Joseph Charles is an English actor, stand-up comedian, author, poet, radio and television presenter, best-known for playing Dave Lister in the British cult-favourite science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf. Since 2005, he has appeared as Lloyd Mullaney in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street.. English actor comedian author poet television presenter and radio DJ
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Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones October 7, 1934), formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, is an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and has taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.
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